Tatehata Akira / 建畠晢 – Ⅰ
In the shopping district under the clear sky, today’s shrimp, shaking his
hair just washed, spreads his yellowed notebook. A sudden smile turns up on
his face, which softens the feelings of his friends surrounding him. “We, who
were born during the Festival of Stone,” the shrimp gently whispers, “have
finally reached this day. Shall we part without refrains?” These were the
words in the autumn wind that flowed through the shopping district. His
friends are now laughing. “Hair already washed, we ought to have nothing
more to say.”
For those who do not mix past and present there are appropriate rewards.
That’s why they share a smile and are about to part under this limpid sky, at
the end of the dialectic of animals, leaving a ceremony without even a chorus.
Their share, if you call it that, is trivial, but you can settle for it by regarding it
as that much of a comprehension for the past. If the shrimp who are irregular
even in age look up at the utterly limpid sky, one or two dead actors will come
down the dream staircase. At the front end of the colorful store a handsome
scholar is failing to be born. It is a spectacle which newly makes you
recognize the peace now.
Ah, the shoal of shrimp with your hair washed, you were born on the day
when pebbles were thrown crisscross. If you closed your eyes, large and small
“phantom quarrels, phantom choruses” flowed away from the fanciest street.
You drank cocoa of grace in the shadow of a wall, and toasted the autumn of
trivial ambition and calculation. Shrimp, but now all that is nothing more than
the “yellowed phantasmagoria” of the notebook that the wind manipulates.
Ah, the past is finally a dream, a dream that’s cut off, the autumn refrain that
stays in your ears…Under the limpid sky you exchange smiles and part
from one another. “We ought to have nothing more to say. First of all, we
have already washed our hair.”
